Timescape Setting

The Past and the One Time Future

To consider the setting of Timescape, we'll have to consider the past and the future, or perhaps more accurately, the once-upon-a-future of 1998.

1998

Welcome to 1998, or as our younger selves thought of it, the year between Big Willie Style and Willennium. Hey, Will Smith's rap career was huge in the late '90s. Don't judge.

But let us remember that this 1998 is not the 1998 of our history, and several small moments pop up throughout the novel to remind us of this fact. For example, Queen Elizabeth II abdicates in this timeline to give the throne to her eldest son, Charles, Prince of Wales, whereas our Queen Elizabeth rules well beyond 1998. Also, the Soviet Union is also still kicking around here rather than giving up the Lenin ghost in 1991.

Perhaps the oddest difference, though, comes in an almost throwaway line when Markham passes "a construction site, where overalled chimps carried stonework and did the odd heavy job," and he thinks "[r]emarkable what the tinkering with the DNA had done in the last few years" (15.78). Clearly, Markham has more to worry about than theoretical physics because that's some serious Rise of the Planet of the Apes foreshadowing going on right there.

But the biggest difference in this soon-to-be apeocracy are the major ecological crises. Africa is suffering from diebacks as a result of a lack of food reserves, and South America has developed a large, poisonous algae bloom off its coast, which is also killing thousands of people (4.34).

These blooms are the result of phytoplankton ''coming to terms with the chlorinated hydrocarbons we've been using in fertilizer'' (9.43). While this poisonous substance starts in the ocean, it eventually migrates into the air in the form of bloom clouds, allowing the poison to spread much more quickly across the world. Once this nasty stuff gets into food, it results in some seriously deadly food poisoning.

Those are some differences between our 1998 and the 1998 of Timescape, but the question we want to ask is: Why choose the year 1998 in the first place? Why not set the future in some far-flung distant year like 2346, where detail-smug close readers like us can't fact-check every detail of your obviously fictional world?

One possible answer to that question is that the novel wants us to understand how quickly scientific discoveries can change the world. The novel was published in 1980, and science had already drastically changed the world in the short time since 1962. Vast nuclear arsenals, microprocessors, putting a man on the moon, and polybutadiene rubber (a.k.a. the bouncy ball) all came to be during those intervening years—and personal computers, cellphones, and the Internet were right around the corner.

The ecological disasters result from fertilizers and herbicides mixing with the environment, as well as the new tools of agriculture that made vast deforestation possible. These advancements in science changed the world for the worse in a very short period of time in the 1998 timeline. So think of this setting as a planet-sized with great power comes great responsibility argument.

1962-63

Now say hello to 1962-63, or as our younger selves thought of it, the decade our parents and the History Channel keep droning on about.

The 1960s in Timescape are very much like the 1960s you've seen said History Channel specials. Think: the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King Jr., free love, John F. Kennedy Jr.—it's all here, and Gordon comes in contact with most of it, even if only in passing. If you'd like to know more about the '60s, we've got a wonderful tour of the decade right here for you.

If you'd like us to put the '60s in a nutshell, though, we'd say that the decade is about reform, revolution, and change. And this is the key to understanding the reason for setting the past sections of Timescape within it. As Gordon considers:

He had a sudden sense that things were converging at this place, this time. The research done here was important. There were the Carroways and their quasar riddle, Gell-Man's arrays of particles, Dyson's visions, Marcuse and Maria Mayer and the news that Jonas Salk was coming to build an institute. La Jolla was a nexus. He was grateful to be here. (40.104)

Gordon focuses on scientific changes and his little corner of the sixties at La Jolla, but the spirit in this thought is the same as the spirit of the decade in general: Change for the better, for the advancement of society and/or science, is possible.

In a novel primarily concerned with the theme of change, and a plot conflict centered on whether the past can be changed to benefit the future, it makes sense to set part of the novel in such a socially pivotal decade.

Fab Labs

In both timelines, the characters tend to hang out in the same places. Gordon, Renfrew, and Markham spend their days working in laboratories at their respective colleges, and they spend their evenings having dinner at home or eating in restaurants.

We believe the reason the novel focuses on these settings within its broader temporal (that's fancy for time) settings stems from Benford's stated desire to write about scientists as they really are. As he put it, "In most of my writing I do try to portray humans as they really are, because I am uncomfortably aware that real science is done by people with dirt under their fingernails." In other words, scientists are people, too.

And so we get settings in which real scientists do real science. This is very different from the Hollywood versions of how scientists go about sciencing (no, that's not a word, but it totally should be). You know the drill: underground labs housing UFOs, military command centers during monster invasions, and corporate laboratories with, of course, money-grubbing bosses asking you to cut corners.

Instead, the novel sets its scenes in places where scientists in real life tend to do their work: listening to theory at conferences, working on experiments in laboratories on college campuses, and doing their research at home.

The cool thing about this is that, instead of delving into the mysteries of the universe from locations normal folks could never get into, instead scientists in this book do so from places that pretty much any bus could take you to.